Intelligent Design

If the challenge below were met, would it be evidence for ID or for teleportation?

In this, Part 3 in a series of posts based on the Q&A section of the recently released DVD, The Case for a Creator, I offer Jonathan Wells’ comments in response to the question, How do you explain the Cambrian explosion of life? How did it happen? We don’t have the foggiest idea how it happened. Assuming a jellyfish was the common ancestor — I don’t believe that — but how do you turn a jellyfish into a trilobite? How do you turn a jellyfish into a fish with a backbone? How do you do it? I don’t just mean taking a scalpel and rearranging the parts like you’re doing a collage in third-grade art class. We’re talking about a Read More ›

We are often told that “there is no ID research published in peer reviewed journals“. I receive Nature E-Alerts in a number of biological research fields. Almost every time I read the abstracts and even the titles, or spend more time delving into the detail, I hear “Intelligent Design” silently screamed from the pages. Am I deluded, or do others hear it too? Here is a recent example. Sharp boundaries of Dpp signalling trigger local cell death required for Drosophila leg morphogenesis Nature Cell Biology – 9, 57 – 63 (2006) http://www.nature.com/ncb/journal/v9/n1/abs/ncb1518.html Morphogens are secreted signalling molecules that govern many developmental processes. In the Drosophila (fruit fly) wing disc, a specific transforming growth factor (Dpp) forms a smooth gradient and Read More ›

Over at Telic Thoughts there is a quote from Ian Lowe of the British Centre For Science Education. The quote originated at David Anderson’s BCSE Revealed blog.

At the BCSE website, under the subheading “What BCSE is not” we read:

We do not object to or support religion or atheism.

But David Anderson provides some interesting insights into two of BCSE’s major players.

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Paul Myers has a post at the Panda’s Thumb that points up a fundamental misconception of some evolutionists (go here for his post). The post is titled “American political conservatism impedes the understanding of science.” The point of the post is to chart the acceptance of evolution** among conservatives, moderates, and liberals against education, and the consistent finding is that conservatives, regardless of education, tend to “believe” evolution less than liberals and moderates (though believing evolution goes up across the board with education). But why should disbelieving evolution reflect a lack of understanding of it? Alternatively, does understanding evolution automatically force one to believe it? I remember speaking at the University of Toronto in 2002 when a biologist challenged me Read More ›

DNA researcher Andras Pellionisz has found unwitting friends in the ID community. He observed that while Darwinists like Richard Dawkins are dismissive of his field of scientific research, ID proponents are surprisingly enthusiastic about his work and that of his colleagues. We have thus found here at Uncommon Descent a friend from quarters I would have never guessed in Dr. Pellionisz and his colleagues.

Pellionisz lamented here that it is the ID proponents who show more interest than people like Dawkins in the highly important areas of research within biology [and imho, evolutionary biology is not a highly important field of research, SYSTEMS Biology is]. Pellionisz then added:
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It seems that every day there some new news item from science detailing how scientists in search of an optimal solution to their problem at hand, end up finding their solution in biological nature. This latest from PhysOrg.com shows how, in the nano-world, engineering solutions abound. Is it a marvel of natural selection?

Here you’ll find one instance of what I think, taken together, poses a challenge to Darwinian orthodoxy that it can’t meet.

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There’s an interesting book review in the Guardian (go here). Below is a brief excerpt. The book is about biocomputing. Increasingly it’s looking as though all the interesting biology is really a form of engineering. If I ever became the president of a university (per impossibile), I would dissolve the biology department and divide the faculty with tenure that I couldn’t get rid of into two new departments: those who know engineering and how it applies to biological systems would be assigned to the new “Department of Biological Engineering”; the rest, and that includes the evolutionists, would be consigned to the new “Department of Nature Appreciation” (didn’t Darwin think of himself as a naturalist?). . . . Amos’s fascinating book Read More ›

I sent the following [addresses munged to foil email address harvestors]: From : David Springer Sent : Saturday, December 23, 2006 12:41 AM To : bforrest CC : dembski, richard.dawkins, Kenneth_Miller, eugeniescott, ddennett, krauss, patricia.princehouse, pennock, welsberr, kpadian, rthompson Subject : Debate Challenge Dear Professor Forrest, I wanted to make sure that you were aware that Professor Dembski has challenged you to a debate. Topics “Perhaps we can settle the matter of cowardice directly: let Forrest and me debate the matter at a symposium spanning a day with each of us delivering two hour-long lectures and then going toe-to-toe in a final exchange.” Many of the commenters think you will decline but are eager to see it should you take Read More ›

See: Billions of Missing Links
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We used to keep this linked on the sidebar. I added it back.

Comments about Comments
by William Dembski on April 16th, 2005

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Here’s an indicator how the ID debate is shaping up in the UK. Please note the extensive comments at the end of this article at the Guardian website (go here). Intelligent design is a science, not a faith By Richard Buggs Tuesday January 9, 2007 The Guardian . . . If Darwin had known what we now know about molecular biology – gigabytes of coded information in DNA, cells rife with tiny machines, the highly specific structures of certain proteins – would he have found his own theory convincing? Randerson thinks that natural selection works fine to explain the origin of molecular machines. But the fact is that we are still unable even to guess Darwinian pathways for the origin Read More ›

Over on Panda’s Thumb they’re so desperate for something to talk about that when I ban someone it’s front page news over there. Don’t people like Richard Hoppe have more important things to do with their time like making sure the entries in the tree of life are in the proper order? I guess not. Who I ban and why is more important than evolutionary biology these days. Ouch. Read More ›

Over on Panda’s Thumb Steve Reuland uses Darwinian methodology to dispute the notion that medical doctors tend to accept ID in greater percentage than scientists in general. So what’s the first thing ole Steverino does to make his case? Why, he trots out a strawman – ID and “evolution” are mutually exclusive. Here’s a clue for Stevie. You can accept ID, descent with modification from a common ancestor, and a 4 billion year-old earth all at the same time. Not all IDists do but many of us do including me. What you can’t accept if you accept ID is that random mutation filtered by natural selection turned mud into man or bacteria into baboons. Got that? Write that down. I Read More ›

Here is one of Discover’s top 6 genetics stories of 2006. Not only are these people doing intelligent design research — they are engineers! 6 Biologists Crack Open Life’s Tool Kit Intelligent design became a scientific reality this year with the report that researchers had custom-made a lifesaving microbe—one that helps make a much-needed drug against malaria. The feat is one of the first concrete applications of synthetic biology, an emerging field in which scientists reshuffle the components of cellular life in order to produce precisely tailored results. Cobbling together the genes of three different species, chemical engineer Jay Keasling of the University of California at Berkeley transformed a metabolic pathway in yeast that allows the engineered microbe to produce Read More ›